Italy - Day 8

San Marino and Florence
We spent one last morning in the fairytale town of San Marino, hiking a trail up to the third tower, doing some last minute shopping and hoping to get a glance of the changing of the guard. We were successful with the first two but not the third and never did see the changing of the guard. However, it was a beautiful morning after a frightful night of thunderstorms and heavy rain, perfect for a morning hike around town.

Dan and Carol on our nature hike to the third tower

Third tower of San Marino

We headed into the lower part of San Marino, the new part of the town, for one last lunch with the team before separating and heading to the Rimini train station. We had arranged with the hotel to have a driver pick us up at our lunch location rather than catch a bus to the train station and were looking for a Voyager van. Imagine our surprise when a sharp dressed gentleman greeted us and escorted us to a Jaguar sedan for our drive. It was pure luxury (and a tad more expensive than the desk quoted us) and we moved A LOT faster than in the bus! It was totally worth it and a great ride.

We entered the train station a little apprehensive about beginning our journey on our own, hoping we would make it to Florence. We purchased tickets to Florence via Bologna and boarded the train and found seats. Our experience with city to city trains is limited to our time in England, which turns out is not the same as in Italy. In England, we could find any open seats and settle in. In Italy, you are assigned seats within a particular compartment, even for second class, and if we had looked at our tickets closer we would have figured this out. However, we did not realize this until we had chosen seats and then felt too stupid to get up and move. When the ticket man came along we stated we thought we were in the wrong seats and car and he just waved us off as if no problem. We were sure to get it right for our trip from Bologna to Florence, which was completely filled. Now that we have one trip under our belt, it doesn’t seem so unnerving.

Carol waiting for the train in Bologna

We arrived in Florence around 5:30 and proceeded to our hotel close to the train station. The hotel was once owned by the Medici family and has been artfully converted into a handful of beautiful rooms. The window to our room has a view of the duomo Santa Maria Novella and is within walking distance to many sights. We had dinner at a small restaurant before heading back to the hotel to crash. We were so exhausted from the past few days, and combined with the luxury of an air conditioned room and no noise from street sweepers or garbage collectors we crawled into bed and crashed until 8:00 a.m.

Picture of the Duomo Santa Maria Novella from our window